Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a method for producing personalized printed end products. The invention additionally relates to a production apparatus for producing personalized printed end products.
Discussion of Related Art
“Print on demand” denotes the production of printed products in a manner conforming to demand. The printed products are often produced on digital printing machines, wherein the printed products can have customized features, such as e.g. personalized QR code and URL (QR: Quick Response, URL: Unified Resource Locator). “Print on demand” is employed in the production of single copies, very short runs of, for example, up to ten copies, short runs of, for example, up to a hundred copies, or in medium-size runs of up to a few hundred thousand copies. For producing very large runs with, for example, millions of copies, “Print on demand” is generally still too expensive.
It is known from the prior art, for producing personalized printed end products, for a printed product produced cost-effectively in a high-capacity method, such as rotary printing, to be provided with a personalized printed product produced, for example, by a digital printing machine.
US 2005/0044476 discloses arranging customized content in a brochure. A content identification serves for personalizing the brochure and is read in from a preprinted brochure part and sent to a content control device. The content control device uses the content identification to obtain instructions from a data memory that serve for creating one or a plurality of freshly printed brochure parts. The freshly printed brochure parts are joined to a preprinted brochure in order to create a customized brochure.
EP 1 911 583 discloses the production of an individualized printed product. A main product or partial product is produced in a high-capacity printing process, such as rotary printing, and is provided with an identification means. The identification means carries the information for identifying the product. The identification means enables the assignment of at least two further downstream individualization steps, such as the addition of information to the respective product. An addressee-specific digital printed product can comprise a blog insert. The identification means can comprise control information which directly controls the processing of the respective product by a processing device.
WO 98/03347 discloses feeding starting products and/or intermediate products as product streams to processing steps and discharging processed objects as streams of end products. In the fed and discharged product streams, individual products or product groups are conveyed successively in a sequence. A property of a processed product or of a processed product group is changed in processing steps. Sequence conversions by transferring products in, by transferring products out or by a combination thereof make it possible to change the sequence of the products or product groups. As a result, the processing steps can be interlinked to any degree of complexity, there nevertheless being high flexibility. Sequence conversions and processing steps are controlled in accordance with properties of the fed products or product groups and/or in accordance with a predefined sequence to be created.
The prior art still does not make it possible to achieve high capacities in the production of personalized printed end products at marketable prices. In order to produce large runs, the prior art discloses methods which either are very expensive or enable only a low degree of personalization. The methods known in the prior art are not robust in relation to malfunctions and the indications about the printed end products actually produced are not very reliable.